Freewill Astrology | April 17-23 

ARIES (March 21-April 19)
A reader from Fiji is encouraging me to pay a visit. “Fiji is heaven on earth,” she says. “You’ll be ecstatic here.” While I have no doubt that’s true, it’s hard for me to imagine being any more ecstatic than I am when I travel to Hawaii. It, too, has resemblances to paradise. And the plane flight there takes five hours less and is $600 cheaper than the jaunt to Fiji. Do I really need a more heavenly heaven on earth than, say, Waimoku Falls Trail in Maui? I expect you’re facing a metaphorically similar situation, Aries. The question you may want to ask yourself is this: Should you pine and aim for a state beyond perfection, or will mere perfection serve you just as well?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
The Washington Post solicited ideas from readers about innovative strategies for wasting time. I’ll offer you a few in the hope that they’ll inspire you to take a major break from the Big Pressing Issues you’re obsessed with. It’s high time, in my opinion, to give yourself an enormous amount of slack ... to forgive yourself for not being perfect ... to dissolve any guilt you feel for not having accomplished all your life goals yet. In that spirit, consider the following time-wasters: 1. Send letters to the editor about grammatical mistakes in the classified ads. 2. Make yourself the world’s top expert on a person randomly chosen from the phone book. 3. Keep a logbook in your bathroom to verify that the toilet bowl cleaner really does work for 1,000 flushes. 4. Set the Guinness record for time spent reading the Guinness Book of Records.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
In her book Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, biologist Olivia Judson extols the male members of the fruitfly species Drosophila bifurca. Although they are barely one-eighth of an inch long, their sperm can be up to 2.3 inches long. If a man were capable of the same prodigious production, his sperm would be as big as a whale. Metaphorically speaking, you Geminis now have the ability to generate phenomena on this scale. That’s why I hope you will devote all your ingenuity and resourcefulness to creating an intricate, beautiful masterpiece, not a humongous, complicated mass of confusion.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)
Lewis Thomas was a physician who wrote elegantly about biology in books like The Lives of a Cell. I want to bring your attention to his meditation on warts. “Nothing in the body has so much the look of toughness and permanence as a wart,” he wrote. And yet “they can be made to go away by something that can only be called thinking ... Warts can be ordered off the skin by hypnotic suggestion.” (tinyurl.com/3clzc5) Thomas regarded this phenomenon as “absolutely astonishing, more of a surprise than cloning or recombinant DNA.” According to my astrological reckoning, Cancerian, you currently have a comparable marvel at your disposal. Using the power of your mind, you can shrink, dissolve, or banish a wart-like vexation.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
This would be a perfect time for you to write your ultimate personal manifesto. I’m talking about composing a sweeping statement of the core ideas that fuel your lust for life. To get you in the mood, take a look at the following lyrics from Danny Schmidt’s song “Company of Friends.” “I believe in restless hunger … I believe in private thunder … I believe in inspiration … I believe in slow creation … I believe in lips on ears ... I believe in being wrong ... I believe in contradiction ... I believe in living smitten ... I believe our book is written by our company of friends.”

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
“The Japanese believe that crying babies grow fast,” wrote John Flinn in the San Francisco Chronicle, “and that the louder an infant wails, the more the gods have blessed it.” The astrological omens suggest that a similar principle will soon hold true for you: The more you sob and blubber, the smarter you’ll get. The louder you howl and moan, the more likely you’ll be to attract benevolent influences and unexpected help.